It's Sunday morning after a big football game and a hung-over
LSU campus slowly stirs. From Tiger Stadium to the Law Center, a small army of
young men meanders among the beige stucco buildings, dragging orange garbage
bags.

The men collect the previous
night's detritus - thousands of beer bottles, plastic cups and other litter
the fans carelessly tossed before leaving campus.

These young men aren't conscientious tailgaters. They are inmates, trucked in from nearby state
prisons. My family and I see them on our way to church. By late morning, as we
return home, the inmates are gone, having restored the campus to its pre-game
beauty.

Perhaps this exercise says something
about the wisdom of giving inmates useful work. It also suggests a certain
disregard among football fans for the school and its lovely campus.

Do they consider LSU as merely
a football team with an English Department?

Talk to them about the quality of LSU, and you'll get an earful about the team's performance, but hardly a peep about the biology department or the engineering program. Tell them that under Gov. Bobby Jindal hundreds of faculty and staff have been laid off or have fled to other schools in pursuit of pay raises or better working conditions, and you might get a blank stare.

Raise tuition to offset some
of Jindal's budget cuts and many of
these fans won't notice. Raise ticket prices,
however, and hear them wail.

And it's not just at LSU.

When did you last read a news story
about how Grambling University's academic programs have
suffered under Jindal's budget cuts? You probably
haven't, because it's a small school in rural north Louisiana. Few people
outside Lincoln Parish noticed the damage until Grambling's football players, upset over deep cuts to their program,
walked out and refused to travel for a game with Jackson State.

What if Grambling's English majors had walked out? Do you think that would
have made national news?

Yet, every student at
Grambling has suffered because of these cuts. State funding there is down 41 percent since the 2007-08 budget year. In that time, Grambling has laid off
more than 10 percent of its workforce. It's eliminated or consolidated
17 academic programs.

The story is no different at
colleges across Louisiana. In the same period, for example, the state
slashed LSU's appropriations by 29 percent percent; McNeese State's, by 38 percent; Southern
University's by 44 percent, and Nicholls
State's by 39 percent.

In a bleak budget report, Grambling officials this
year observed that their school "has essentially gone from a
state 'funded' institution to a state 'assisted' institution." The same applies to every
public college or university in Louisiana. Consequently, these universities
have hiked tuition, deferred building maintenance, cancelled degree programs
and said goodbye to hundreds of valued faculty members.

As Jindal and his legislative handmaidens systematically defund Louisiana's colleges, the students rarely protest and their parents won't demand different funding priorities. Perhaps that's why Jindal and the Legislature keep cutting - they think we don't know or don't care.

And, maybe, they're right.

If you're a college freshman, how should you know that the
world-renowned professor in your field fled last year for another school? You're just struggling to pass biology, trusting that state
officials are doing their best to educate you.

Only, they aren't.

Instead of dedicating
themselves to building an excellent college system, in 2008 Jindal and the
Legislature awarded hundreds of millions in tax cuts to the state's wealthiest taxpayers. They decimated the state's higher education budget. The recession surely had an
impact (although federal stimulus dollars propped up our college budgets for
several years). Nothing, however, hurt more than Jindal's choice of wealthy taxpayers over college students.

Restoring this money will be
difficult. After all, Jindal is running for president. He'll never raise income tax rates to 2008 levels. By now, he's made it clear that he mostly cares about courting the
national press and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. Besides, he and
legislators also know that most of these young college graduates don't vote.

Busy trashing our colleges' budgets, Jindal also knows that most Louisiana citizens
couldn't care less about the state of
higher education. Just look at how the tailgaters routinely trash the LSU campus.

The polls might say these "fans" love LSU, but the mountains of trash scattered among the stately oaks don't lie. They love football, not the English
Department.